“Bruce perhaps here is the opportunity to confront the issue of your having on four separate occasions late last fall slept with a Simmons College sophomore from Great Neck, New York. Perhaps you’d care to discuss a certain Halloween party.”
‘Last summer was no fun, and when I’d tell him that at Christmas, he’d get mad, and tell me not to bring it up unless I was trying to really tell him something. I’d already started to be friends with the guy from Stats, but I wouldn’t have even been interested in hanging around with him if things had been OK with Bruce and me.’
‘I sleep and eat and sit around a great deal, and the red in my eye slowly fades. I wash insects’ remains from my mother’s windshield. For a time I devote most of my energy to immersing myself in the lives and concerns of two adults for whom I have a real and growing affection. My uncle is an insurance adjuster, though he’s due for early retirement at the end of the year because of the state of his wind: the family worries about the possibility of his car breaking down on one of the uncountable Aroostook County roads he crisscrosses every day, adjusting claims. The winters here are killers. I have the feeling that when my uncle retires he will do nothing but watch television and tease my aunt and relate stories about the claims he adjusts. His stories are not to be believed. They all start with, “I had a loss once…” He talks to me, in the living room, over the few beers he’s allowed each day. He tells me that he’s always been a homebody and a family man, that he loved spending time with his family—the children now grown and gone south, to Portland and Augusta and Bath—that there have been plenty of fools in his agency who spent all their time on their careers or their hunting or their golf or their peckers, and then what did they have, when winter came and the world got snowed in, after all? My aunt teaches third grade at the elementary school across town, and has the summer off, but she’s taking two courses, a French and a Sociology, at the University of Maine’s Prosopopeia branch downtown. For a few days after I’m rested I ride over with her to the little college and sit in the campus library while she’s in class. The library is tiny, cute, like the children’s section of a public facility, with carpet and furniture and walls colored in the muted earth-tones of autumn rot. There is hardly anyone in the summer library except two very heavy women who inventory the books at the tops of their lungs. It is at once too noisy and too quiet to do any real work, and I have no ideas that do not seem to me shallow and overwrought. I really feel, sitting, trying to extrapolate on the equations that have informed the last two years of my life, as though I’d been shot in the head. I end up writing disordered pieces, or more often letters, without direction or destination. What is to prove? It seems as though I’ve disproved everything. I soon stop going to the UMP library. Days go by, and my aunt and uncle are impeccably kind, but Maine becomes another here instead of a there.’
“Explain.”
‘Things become bad. I now have a haircut the shadow of which scares me. It occurs to me that neither my aunt nor my uncle has once asked what happened to the pretty little thing that came visiting with us last time we were up, and I wonder what my mother has said to my aunt. I begin to be anxious about something I can neither locate nor define. I have trouble sleeping: I wake very early every morning and wait, cold, for the sun to rise behind the gauzy white curtains of my cousins’ old room. When I sleep I have unpleasant, repetitive dreams, dreams involving leopards, skinned knees, a bent old cafeteria fork with crazy tines. I have one slow dream in which she is bagging leaves in my family’s yard in Indiana and I am pleading with her magically to present with amnesia, to be for me again, and she tells me to ask my mother, and I go into the house, and when I come out again, with permission, she is gone, the yard knee-deep in leaves. In this dream I am afraid of the sky: she has pointed at it with her rake handle and it is full of clouds which, seen from the ground, form themselves into variegated symbols of the calculus and begin to undergo manipulations I neither cause nor understand. In all my dreams the world is windy, disordered, gray.’
“Now you stop kissing pictures and tearing up proofs and begin to intuit that things are, and have been, much more general and in certain respects sinister all along.”
‘I begin to realize that she might never have existed. That I might feel this way now for a different—maybe even no—reason. The loss of a specific referent for my emotions is wildly disorienting. Two and a half weeks have passed since I came here. The receptacle is lying on the bureau in my room, still bent from the tollbooth. My affections have become a sort of faint crust on the photo, and the smell when I open the receptacle in the morning is chemically bitter. I stay inside all day, avoid windows, and cannot summon hunger. My testicles are drawn up constantly. They begin to hurt. Whole periods of time now begin to feel to me like the intimate, agonizing interval between something’s falling off and its hitting the ground. My aunt says I look pale. I put some cotton in my ear, tell her I have an earache, and spend a lot of time wrapped in a scratchy blanket, watching Canadian television with my uncle.’
“This sort of thing can be good.”
‘I begin to feel as though my thoughts and voice here are in some way the creative products of something outside me, not in my control, and yet that this shaping, determining influence outside me is still me. I feel a division which the outside voice posits as the labor pains of a nascent emotional conscience. I am invested with an urge to “write it all out,” to confront the past and present as a community of signs, but this requires a special distance I seem to have left behind. For a few days I exercise instead—go for long, shambling runs in jeans and sneakers, move some heavy mechanical clutter out of my uncle’s backyard. It leaves me nervous and flushed and my aunt is happy; she says I look healthy. I take the cotton out of my ear.’
“All this time you’re communicating with no one.”
‘I let my aunt do the talking to my parents. I do, though, have one odd and unsatisfactory phone conversation with my eldest brother, who is an ophthalmologist in Dayton. He smokes a pipe and is named Leonard. Leonard is far and away my least favorite relative, and I have no clue why I call him one night, collect, very late, and give him an involved and scrupulously fair edition of the whole story. We end up arguing. Leonard maintains that I am just like our mother and suffer from an unhappy and basically silly desire to be perfect; I say that this has nothing constructive to do with anything I’ve said, and that furthermore I fail to see what’s so bad about wishing to be perfect, since being perfect would be… well, perfect. Leonard invites me to think about how boring it would be to be perfect. I defer to Leonard’s extensive and hard-earned knowledge about being boring, but do point out that since being boring is an imperfection, it would by definition be impossible for a perfect person to be boring. Leonard says I’ve always enjoyed playing games with words in order to dodge the real meanings of things; this segues with suspicious neatness into my intuitions about the impending death of lexical utterance, and I’m afraid I indulge myself for several minutes before I realize that one of us has severed the connection. I curse Leonard’s pipe, and his wife with a face like the rind of a ham.’
“Though of course your brother was only pointing out that perfection, when we get right down to the dark, cheese-binding heart of the matter, is impossible.”
‘There is no shortage of things that are perfect for the function that defines them. Peano’s axioms. A chameleon’s coat. A Turing Machine.’
“Those aren’t persons.”
‘No one has ever argued persuasively that that has anything to do with it. My professors stopped trying.’
“Could we possibly agree on whom you might ask now?”
‘He said real poetry won’t be in words after a while. He said the icy beauty of the perfect signification of fabricated nonverbal symbols and their relation through agreed-on rules will come slowly to replace first the form and then the stuff of poetry. He says an epoch is dying and he can hear the rattle. I have all this in letters he sent me. I keep all my l
etters in a box. He said poetic units that allude and evoke and summon and are variably limited by the particular experience and sensitivity of individual poets and readers will give way to symbols that both are and stand for what they’re about, that both the limit and the infinity of what is real can be expressed best by axiom, sign, and function. I love Emily Dickinson. I said I wasn’t going to pretend like I understood and disagreed but it seemed like what he thought about poetry was going to make poetry seem cold and sad. I said a big part of the realness that poems were about for me, when I read them, was feelings. I wasn’t going to pretend to be sure, but I didn’t think numbers and systems and functions could make people feel any way at all. Sometimes, when I said it, he felt sorry for me, and said I wasn’t conceiving the project right, and he’d play with my earlobes. But sometimes at night he’d get mad and say that I was just one of those people that are afraid of everything new and unavoidable and think they’re going to be bad for people. He came so close to calling me stupid that I almost got really mad. I’m not stupid. I graduated college in three years. And I don’t think all new things and things changing are bad for people.’
“How could you think this was what the girl was afraid of?”
‘Today, a little over three weeks in Prosopopeia, I am sitting in my relatives’ living room, with the cotton back in my ear, watching the lunchtime news on a Canadian station. I suspect it’s nice outside. There is trouble in Quebec. I can hear my aunt saying something, in the kitchen. In a moment she comes in, wiping her hands on a small towel, and says that the stove is acting up. Apparently she can’t get the top of the stove to heat, that sometimes it acts up. She wants to heat some chili for my uncle and me to eat when he comes home for lunch. He’ll be home in the early afternoon. There’s not much else for a good lunch in the house, and she’s not fussy for going to the IGA because she has to prepare for a French quiz, and I’m certainly not going to go out in the wind with that ear acting up like it’s been, and she can’t get the stove to work. She asks me if I could maybe have a quick look at the stove.’
‘I’m not afraid of new things. I’m just afraid of feeling alone even when there’s somebody else there. I’m afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that’s selfish, but it’s the way I feel.’
‘The stove is indeed officially acting up. The stovetop burners do not respond. My aunt says it’s an electrical thingummy in the back of the stove, that comes loose, that my uncle can always get it working again but he won’t be home until she’s already in class, and the chili won’t be able to simmer, reblend, get tasty. She says if it wouldn’t make my ear hurt could I try to get the stove going? It’s an electrical thingummy, after all. I say no problem. She goes for my uncle’s toolbox in the closet by the cellar door. I reach back and unplug this huge, ugly old white stove, pull it away from the wall and the new dishwasher. I get a Phillips out of my uncle’s box and remove the stove’s back panel. The stove is so old I can’t even make out the manufacturer’s name. It is possibly the crudest piece of equipment ever conceived. Its unit cord is insulated in some sort of ancient fabric wrap with tiny red barber-spirals on it. The cord simply conducts a normal 220 house AC into a five-way distributor circuit at the base of the stove’s guts. Bundles of thick, inefficient wires in harness lead from each of the four burner controls and from the main oven’s temperature setting into outflow jacks on the circuit. The burner controls determine temperature level at the selected point through straightforward contact and conduction of AC to the relevant burner’s heating unit, each of which units is simply a crudely grounded high-resistance transformer circuit that conducts heat, again through simple contact, into the black iron spiral of its burner. Energy-to-work ratios here probably sit at no better than 3/2. There aren’t even any reflecting pans under the burners. I tell my aunt that this is an old and poor and energy-inefficient stove. She says she knows and is sorry but they’ve had it since before Kennedy and it’s got sentimental value, and that this year it came down to either a new stove or a new dishwasher. She is sitting at the sunlit kitchen table, reviewing verb tenses, apologizing about her stove. She says the chili needs to go on soon to simmer and reblend if it’s going to go on at all; do I think I can fix the thingummy or should she run to the store for something cold?’
‘I’ve only gotten one letter since he left, and all it says is how much he’s taking care of a picture of me, and would I believe he kisses it? He didn’t really like to kiss me. I could feel it.’
‘The harnessed bundles of insulated wires all seem well connected to their burners’ transformers, so I have to disconnect each bundle from its outflow jack on the distributor circuit and look at the circuit itself. The circuit is just too old and grimy and crude and pathetic to be certain about, but its AC-input and hot-current-outputs seem free of impediment or shear or obvious misconnection. My aunt is conjugating French ir-verbs in the imperfect. She has a soft voice. It’s quite pretty. She says: “Je venais, tu venais, il venait, elle venait, nous venions, vous veniez, ils venaient, elles venaient.” I am deep in the bowels of the stove when she says my uncle once mentioned that it was just a matter of a screw to be tightened or something that had to be given a good knock. This is not especially helpful. I tighten the rusted screws on the case of the distributor circuit, reattach the unit cord to the input jack, and am about to reattach the bundles of wire from the burners when I see that the harnesses, bundle casings, and the outflow jacks on the circuit are so old and worn and be-gooed that I can’t possibly tell which bundle of wires corresponds to which outflow jack on the circuit. I am afraid of a fire hazard if the current is made to cross improperly in the circuit, and the odds are (½)4! that anyone could guess the proper jack for each bundle correctly. “Je tenais,” my aunt says to herself. “Tu tenais, il tenait.” She asks me if everything is going all right. I tell her I’ve probably almost got it. She says that if it’s something serious it would really be no trouble to wait until my uncle gets home, that he’s an old hand with that devil of a stove and could have a look; and if neither he nor I could get the thing going we two could just go out and get a bite. I feel my frightening haircut and tell her I’ve probably almost got it. I decide to strip some of the bundles of their old pink plastic casings for a few inches to see whether the wires themselves might be color-coded. I detach the bundles from their harnesses and strip down the first two, but all the wires reveal themselves to be the same dull, silverfish-gray, their conduction elements so old and frayed that the wires begin to unravel and stick out in different directions, and become disordered, and now I couldn’t get them back in the distributor circuit even if I could tell where they went, not to mention the increased hazard inherent in crossing current in bare wires. I begin to sweat. I notice that the stove’s unit cord’s cloth insulation is itself so badly worn that one or two filaments of copper 220-wire are protruding. The cord could have been the trouble all along. I realize that I should have tried to activate the main oven unit first to see whether the power problem was even more fundamental than the burner bundles or the circuit. My aunt shifts in her chair. I begin to have trouble breathing. Stripped, frayed burner wires are spread out over the distributor like gray hair. The wires will have to be rebound into bundles in order to be reinserted and render the burners even potentially workable, but my uncle has no tool for binding. Nor have I ever personally bound a system of wire. The work that interests me is done with a pencil and a sheet of paper. Rarely even a calculator. At the cutting edge of electrical engineering, almost everything interesting is resolvable via the manipulation of variables. I’ve never once been stumped on an exam. Ever. And I appear to have broken this miserable piece-of-shit stove. I am unsure what to do. I could attach the main oven’s own conduction bundle to a burner’s outflow jack on the distributor circuit, but I have no idea how hot the resultant surge would render the burner. There is no way to know without data on the resistance ratios in the metal composition of the burners. The current used to heat a large oven even to WARM could m
elt a burner down. It’s not impossible. I begin almost to cry. My aunt is moving on to ir/iss verbs. “Je partissais, tu partissais, il partissait, elle partissait.” ’
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